CES 2008: LittleBigPlanet Hands-On

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Media Molecule's marvel continues to impress.

By Charles Onyett

At a show without much of a focus on gaming, it was surprising to see Sony show off one of their heavy hitters for 2008, Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet (LBP). While Sony has published some great games for their system like Uncharted and Ratchet and Clank, neither of those games really seem to have the staying power that LBP is poised to offer. Such value in lasting appeal draws from the game's extensive and versatile user modding support, letting players create their own stages to pilot cutesy, fuzzy characters through with 2D platforming mechanics.

This time around we got to see a few new things in LBP, mainly deadly traps and how the game handles death. In a stage titles Indian Hot Spice, we and a Sony rep hopped around in a sort of Wild West 2D environment, bounding over chasms and ducking under moving platforms riffed with searing hot coal. With one touch the coals kill your fluffy character, sending them hopping off the screen like a ringless Sonic the Hedgehog on spikes. The stage was decked out with frequent checkpoints, little rings of light, which allowed for the defeated character to return to the action.

Hazards in the stage never got too complicated. It was basically just a bunch of moving platforms with coals on one side that you had to time jumps or runs to avoid. We did manage to die quite a bit, however, as did the Sony rep, which gave us time to check out the real-time clothing swapping options. Hitting square pops up a UI over your character's head that lists options for changing appearance and level modding. Since we were already in a level, we couldn't access any of the build tools, but could outfit our little avatar with bike helmets, sun dresses, different kinds of eyes, various glasses, shirts, and all sorts of other stuff. It didn't really affect any of the gameplay, but it was still fun to play around with. Overall it wasn't anything all that surprising – there weren't any really interesting kinds of physics-based puzzles or something like that.

Anyway, the meat of the game seems to be with the creation tools, which seem to be very well designed. Basically, anything you think you should be able to do, you can. Well, that's probably not true, but many things you think you should be able to do, it seems you can. We didn't actually get to use the tools, but watched as the Sony rep built a forest out of nothing. When first entering into the creator you get to select a background, which you can apparently import your own pictures to. Then it's only a matter of what you want to create.

By selecting the item from the build menu, things started off with a simple square on the ground, textured to look something like bark. But, as most people know, tree trunks aren't squarish in profile, they're more rectangular. Thankfully LBP has a handy erase tool that can be scaled to any size in quite a range of shapes to alter whatever shape you're working with, and easily cut the square down to a rectangle. Then with only a button press you can copy the shape and paste it, resize the pasted shape, then merge it with the original rectangle in whatever orientation you wish.

For the purposes of the demo, the original rectangle was pasted twice, resized into smaller rectangles, and merged with the top of the vertically oriented original to form a shape something like that of a necktie as it disappears under a shirt collar. With this new shape it's yet again possible to resize it, reorient it, or even adjust it's depth. The 2D plane isn't strictly 2D, you see, there's a little bit of room to move back and forth, sort of like in a thin fishtank. This adds yet another layer into the puzzle / platforming elements of the game.

Once the rectangle shape was pasted a few more times until the Y shape looked like it had fireworks shooting out its top. Then from menu list and leaf shapes were selected and pasted onto the tree, which could be inverted and oriented to whatever angle you wanted. The shape now resembled a rudimentary tree, and even this, with different kinds of objects and shapes all merged together, can be resized and flipped around however you want. Since a forest was being created, the tree was copied and pasted a few times and set end to end across the screen.